AMD Ships Six-Core 'Istanbul' Server Chip

AMD officially launched its six-core "Istanbul" server processor on Monday, with features that the company said would be extended over the full range of the product line.

AMD officially launched its six-core "Istanbul" server processor on Monday, with features that the company said would be extended over the full range of the product line.

The six-core Istanbul processor has begun shipping, and variants focusing on differing levels of power and performance  the HE, SE, and EE versions  will begin shipping by the third quarter, according to Leslie Sobon, the vice president of worldwide product marketing at AMD. It will be offered in two-socket, four-socket, and eight-socket configurations. AMD's partners will begin shipping this month, Sobon said.

AMD's Istanbul is not the first six-way server processor; Intel launched the "Dunnington" in 2008, based on the Penryn processor architecture. But AMD executives dismissed it was as "it was big, it was hot, it was slower," and ran on an older, shared front-side bus.

According to Matt Eastwood, an analyst on IDC, noted that about 50 cents of every IT dollar goes to power costs, or $28 billion to $30 billion per year. The Istanbul processor offers 34 percent more performance per watt than the Shanghai processor, AMD executives said.

The Istanbul, meanwhile, uses HyperTransport links to connect the microprocessor cores to eliminate processing bottlenecks. Another technology, called "HT Assist," uses part of the level-3 cache as a type of look-up table, eliminating the need to poll each microprocessor when making a cache request for a particular piece of data. Instead, the core only needs to poll one other to find the data's location.

Istanbul also uses DDR-2 memory, while Intel has moved to DDR-3. The reason? Cost and legacy support, AMD executives said. OEMs requested backward compatibility, executives said. And since servers are packed with far more memory than a client, the premiums attached to DDR-3 (about a dollar per memory module) can make them prohibitive: Most companies aren't looking to pay a premium on a component that's 20 to 25 percent of the cost of the server, executives said.